


Six Arms and Six Legs  (That No One Quite Knows What To Do With)

by icebluenothing



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-11
Updated: 2013-06-11
Packaged: 2017-12-14 16:57:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/839200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icebluenothing/pseuds/icebluenothing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor gets a night-time visit from his near-future self, whose wedding night is not going according to plan. But River's had a suggestion, which the Doctor might have taken a little too literally ....</p>
            </blockquote>





	Six Arms and Six Legs  (That No One Quite Knows What To Do With)

"Well," the Doctor said to no one, “that was absolutely exhausting.” He threw himself down on his bed petulantly. It was strangely satisfying and he briefly contemplated standing up and doing it again, but the bed was far too comfortable to really consider it seriously.

It had all certainly sounded like fun when he first got the phone call, but tracking down Bastet on the space-bound Orient Express, and then getting her safely bound away again inside the Seventh Obelisk — it had all turned out to be a bit much for one day, and Amy and Rory were practically dragging their feet by the time they got back to the TARDIS. No wonder they had immediately wanted to run straight off to bed. The Doctor was tired enough himself that he was actually contemplating sleeping.

He was a bit surprised, then, to find himself bounding out of bed back onto his feet and pelting down the hall at high speed. He replayed the last few seconds over in his head — he’d heard something, it sounded almost like a scream —

There it was again! Up ahead, Amy and Rory’s room, and he skidded to a halt in front of their door and raised his hand to knock, but some instinct made him pause for a beat, listen again.

Oh.  _Oh._

It seemed the Ponds weren’t nearly so tired after all. Odd. They’d seemed completely shagged out. Hmm. Perhaps that was a poor choice of words.

Judging by the sounds coming from the other side of that door, they were going to completely  _ruin_  the ladder on that perfectly good bunk bed. Listen to them. You’d think it were their —

Oh, that’s right. It  _was_  their wedding night. It had quite slipped his mind by this point.

He tried to remember his own wedding night. Seven hundred years ago, at least, wasn’t it? Blimey, time flies. Still. Not like he hadn’t seen plenty of action since then. There was that one time with Rose, for example.

He smiled fondly at the memory of it. He had very, very nearly, practically almost kissed her right on the cheek. He shook his head. He’d been so wild and impulsive in his previous regeneration. Ahh, the folly of youth.

Another sudden sound startled him out of his reverie. Oh, dear, that had been a perfectly good lamp.

I suppose I should leave them to it, he thought. Can’t stand around all day listening to my companions have sex. People will talk.

He wandered idly back in the general direction of his room. When had the last time been, he tried to remember, when he’d actually had some womanly company himself? He considered his opportunities. Martha had certainly been well fit, and he imagined he might well have taken a fancy to her, if only she’d ever shown any sign of interest in him. Oh, well, probably for the best.

And then there was, well, there was Amy. Not, he was quick to tell himself, that that would have been a good idea. Not even during one of those times that Rory was dead. Or had never existed. It’s just not a good idea to come between a woman and her dead, non-existent, possibly-plastic fiancé. That was a strict rule he had and he stood by it.

Besides, it’s not like he could even be sure she really fancied him. True, she had once shoved him up against the nearest convenient flat surface and snogged the hell out of him and then tried to pull him by his braces onto her bed, but she might just have been being friendly. Oh, why did women have to be so difficult to read?

He’d never really been any good at it. After all, how long did Romana end up having to run around in little schoolgirl outfits before it finally dawned on him that she might possibly have been hinting at something?

Not that men were any easier to figure out. Take, for example, the time Jack had sidled up to him in the console room and whispered in his ear, “I want to do you so hard right here up against the console, you goddamn sexy man, you.” There were just too many ways to interpret a sentence like that. What could he possibly have meant by it?

He had nearly reached his bedroom door when he stopped short. He  _had_  been kissed recently — and, he was forced to admit, rather expertly — by River. Professor River Song, in the Stormcage.

He’d apparently done all too good a job of keeping that one out of his head. It had confused him a little too much. (If he were being more honest with himself, he might, perhaps, admit that “terrified” might be a slightly better word to use in this context than “confused.”) He hadn’t thought about it since.

He was thinking about it now, though.

Right, he told himself firmly, cold shower, then straight to bed.

He opened the door to his bedroom. He looked inside. There he was, already sitting on his bed.

The Doctor sitting on the bed looked up from the Nancy Drew book he was reading. “Took you long enough,” he said. “Where have you been?”

“I was just — out, about, you know, wandering …. ” The Doctor trailed off. “I’m sorry, should you be here?”

“Well, I can’t imagine why not. This  _is_  my bedroom.”

“You know perfectly well what I mean.”

“Yes, yes, don’t get your feathers all ruffled. You mean, crossing my own timestream, fate of the universe, all the stuff we say to the rubes. Relax. I’ve moved the TARDIS into a neutral still point. Perfectly safe.”

“Oh. Well, good.” He hadn’t heard the TARDIS’ engines. “When did you do all that, exactly?”

The other Doctor closed the book, tossed it on to the bed, and looked up at him with a broad smile. “While you were off listening to Amy and Rory having sex.”

“No, I wasn’t, I just — that was — ”

“Oh, the look on your face. No point denying it. I remember doing it.” He grinned again and leaned back on the bed.

“It’s perfectly natural for them to be having sex,” the Doctor said, being defensive about exactly the wrong thing. “It is their wedding night. Well — their let’s-reboot-the-universe, slash get-you-married, slash go-track-down-an-Egyptian-goddess-for-Liz-Ten night, technically. Bit of a busy day, actually.” He suddenly wanted to sit down, but the only place was the bed, and he was already sitting there.

“Yeah, I remember. You forgot Liz Ten, by the way. In your list of people you probably could have snogged if you’d played your cards right.”

“The Queen? Do you really think so? Because me and royalty, that — never goes well.”

“Yeah, I think so. Well — I think I think so.” He stood and stretched. “So. Amy and Rory’s wedding night! What a time that was, eh? I’ve just come from a wedding myself, actually.”

“Oh? Whose?” The Doctor said, not really that interested but mainly trying to figure out if there was some casual way he could step past himself and reclaim the bed.

“Ours.”

“You and  _Liz Ten?”_

“No, no, no, no, no. No. Ours, as in yours and mine.”

“Oh, right. Wait.  _We_  get married? Where is that even legal?”

The other Doctor looked at him the way one might look at a particularly slow child. He wasn’t used to being on the receiving end of that expression. “Not,” he said, with exaggerated patience, “to each other. I meant mine, really.  _I_  get married. I was just including you in that statement to be polite.”

The Doctor nodded impatiently. “Right, yes, okay. Fine. I knew that wasn’t what you meant. So. Who’s the lucky girl? You, ahh, sly dog, you?” He reached out and punched his other self gingerly on the shoulder.

The other Doctor’s expression clouded over. “Can’t tell you that,” he said mildly. “Spoilers.”

“  _. . . . We marry River Song?”_

The other Doctor’s lips pursed. “You weren’t supposed to figure that out!”

“You were forgetting, of course, how terribly clever I am. River Song? Really?”

He sighed. “Yes, really, if you must know.”

“But she’s — she’s — ”

“Yes?”

“ — A  _girl.”_

There was that expression again. “Well, yes,” he said slowly. “I’m given to understand that’s usually how this sort of thing works.”

“I know, I know, it’s just — I would have thought the universe would come to an end before I’d ever end up with River Song.”

“Ahh. Well. Funny you should mention . . . . ”

The Doctor really was too tired to stand anymore. “Slide over.”

His other self obligingly did. The Doctor sat down, picked up the book, and glanced at the back cover. “So, why  _are_  you here?” he asked, not looking up. “I’m presuming this isn’t a social call. Wait a moment,” he said, “did you say you’d  _just_  come from a wedding? Shouldn’t you be at your own wedding night, instead of sitting around talking to yourself?”

“Ahh.” The other Doctor looked crestfallen. “About that.”

“ . . . . Wedding night not going well?”

“ . . . . Not — not what you’d  _call_  going well, no. Unless you happened to have astonishingly low standards as to what constitutes ‘going well.’ Which, as it happens, River doesn’t.”

“ . . . . I see.”

“It’s not my fault! It’s just — it’s been a long time, that’s all. I don’t really remember my way  _around_  a woman.” He made vague, curvy shapes in the air with his hands. “And River is — River is rather a lot of woman to have to try to figure out how to handle all at once. So, so far, our wedding night has been a bit like — like — ”

“ — Like throwing a monkey behind the controls of the Concorde?”

He looked hurt. “Well, I wouldn’t have put it quite like  _that.”_

“Actually, you just did.” He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Look, I’m sorry to hear that, but why are you coming to me for advice? I’m your past self. I am, by definition, less experienced at this sort of thing than you are.”

“Well — it was something River said.” The other Doctor suddenly wasn’t looking right at him any more, but seemed to have found something fascinating enough to demand all of his attention about three feet ahead of them on the floor. “She said, well, to put it bluntly — ”

“Which I’m sure she did — ”

“To put it bluntly, she said I should have figured out my own sexual pleasure before I try to please anyone else.” He frowned. “So. That’s why I’m here.”

“I see,” the Doctor said, and then actually thought about what he was hearing. “Oh, you can’t  _possibly_  be serious.”

“Oh, come on, don’t be like that about it.”

“Look, even putting aside whether or not it would be a good idea, which it isn’t, and putting aside the fact that I don’t think this is exactly what she  _meant_  — I think she probably was suggesting that you might want to have a bit of a wank every now and then, actually — there is just no way I would possibly be up for it tonight. I am absolutely knackered.”

“Right, I thought that might be for the best, actually,” the other Doctor said, still not looking at him. “I thought it might make you a bit more — docile.”

“Docile?  _Docile?”_

“Oh, keep your voice down — ”

“Oh, you sweet talker, you! Nope, somehow not feeling aroused yet, strangely enough!”

“All right, all right, you’ve made your point. I told her this wasn’t a good idea.”

“You — you told her you were going to do this?”

“’Course I did. What, did you think I told her I was just stepping out down to the shops, won’t be a minute?”

“Well, no, but — did she actually seem happy with the idea?”

“Oh, yes!” He stopped and frowned. “Actually, she was laughing, now that I stop to think about it. But I’m sure it was a good kind of laugh.”

“Wonderful.” He flopped backwards onto the bed and screwed his eyes tight shut. “My future wife has sent my future self back in time to sex me up. Just when I thought this day wasn’t going to get any stranger.”

“So — that’s not a yes, then?”

He opened one eye carefully and considered.

“Well,” he said finally, “it’s not a  _no . . . . ”_

The other Doctor looked so wide-eyed and hopeful that he couldn’t help but grin. “Oh, come here, you,” he said finally.

His future self leaned forward, lower and lower, hands raised uncertainly in the air like a potter with a wheel that might spin out of control at any moment. “I,” he said finally, “have absolutely no idea how to approach this.”

“Neither do I. I’ve never done this before either, remember.”

That wasn’t strictly true — there had been one time, back at the Academy, when Koschei had dared him to cross his own timestream, but there was alcohol involved and it was all a bit of a blur and there had actually been kind of a  _lot_  of alcohol and those pictures had probably been faked anyway.

“Do you think I should — should I kiss you first or try to get your shirt off?”

The Doctor shrugged. “Dealer’s choice.”

“Right. Umm. Shirt, then.” He reached for the bow tie first. And fumbled with it for a few moments.

“Having trouble?”

“I’m — not used to doing this from this angle,” he said.

“That’s probably not the last time you’ll be saying that tonight. Blimey, if you’re having this much trouble with a bow tie, how on earth did you manage with River’s — you know — her  _bra?”_

The other Doctor looked flushed. “She has other ones. She has plenty of other ones, it’ll be fine. Would you just hold still a minute?”

“I’m not even moving.  _You_  hold still.”

“You two,” a third voice suddenly said, “are absolutely hopeless. It’s a good thing for you I’m here.”

They looked up.

Standing in the doorway of the bedroom was the Doctor.

“Now, pay attention,” the other other Doctor said. “Here’s where it gets a bit complicated.”

The Doctor sighed and let go of the bow tie. “Oh, now this is just ridiculous. What are you doing here?”

“Me? Well, I’m here to take another go at this, because quite frankly, you made something of a dog’s breakfast of it the first time.”

The Doctor stiffened — so to speak — and managed to look as dignified as one possibly can when one has just been caught straddling one’s former self. “I’m handling this quite well on my own, thank you very much.”

“Oh, really?” He leaned against the doorframe and crossed his arms. “Have you even managed to get his bow tie off yet?”

“Well — there has been a slight,  _slight_  mind you, hardly insurmountable, barely-worth-mentioning difficulty with the bow tie, but — ”

“Come on. You hardly need a sonic screwdriver for that.” The newly-arrived Doctor stopped to consider. “Although actually, now that I think of it — ”

“I’m perfectly capable of taking off my own bow tie, actually,” the Doctor on his back said. “If that would help speed things along here. Is this going to take long?”

“You stay out of this,” the other two Doctors said simultaneously.

“A little help might not be a bad idea.”

“Right, just as I thought. Move over.”

The other two Doctors awkwardly tried to make room for him. This bed really wasn’t big enough for three people, no matter what Jack had always tried to imply. The Doctor was never really sure why he kept insisting it would be.

“Do I really not get any say in this?”

“We’re outvoting you,” one of the other Doctors said. He’d lost track of which was which.

“Also, we’re older than you,” the other one said, as he pulled the bow tie slithering free, as the other one started unbuttoning his shirt. “You should respect your elders,” he said.

Both Doctors leaned down toward him at the same time, and their heads collided with an audible thump. “Sorry,” they said simultaneously.

“Nope, still not feeling it,” said the Doctor. “Seriously, did you really think this through? Oh,  _that_  went badly, you thought — I know, I’ll add another set of hands to the equation and that will make everything  _less awkward?_  Was that actually your thought process? Only I’d really like to know.”

The new arrival frowned. “I hadn’t really thought of it like that. I suppose I could just — sit back and watch for a minute. You know — give you directions, correct you when you get a bit wrong, that sort of thing.”

The other one frowned back. “Absolutely not.”

Exasperated, the other other one looked down at him and said, “Well, what would  _you_  suggest? This is your seduction we’re trying to arrange here, after all.”

The Doctor sighed and closed his eyes for a moment. “Look,” he said, “if anyone’s going to sit back and watch, it should be me. You both seem to keep forgetting, I really am absolutely exhausted. Why don’t you two just — just start without me? That would accomplish the same thing, surely?”

The other two looked up at each other in surprise. Then grinned.

“Oh, what the hell,” one of them said, and reached out and pulled the other close and kissed him. Just like that. And then, and this was the surprising bit, he kept kissing him.

The Doctor watched them for a moment. Purely out of curiosity, he told himself.

They  _did_ look like they were having fun.

Perhaps, he decided — perhaps he wasn’t really  _that_  tired, all things considered.

 

*     *     *     *

 

The look Amy was giving himwas not unlike the expression on the face of a startled gazelle.

“Ahhh. Amy. I was just — are you — ummm. Nice night, isn’t it?”

This conversation might possibly have been slightly less awkward if he hadn’t just stepped out of the shower, dripping wet, with a towel that didn’t really quite make it all the way around his waist.

And possibly if Amy were wearing anything other than Rory’s Roman soldier uniform.

And definitely if both of them weren’t giving off that guilty, awkward, look-at-me-I-just-had-an-awful-lot-of-sex vibe. And each noticing that the other was doing exactly the same thing and hoping that the other one hadn’t noticed that they were doing it. That would definitely have helped.

“Can’t complain,” Amy said. Her wide eyes carefully fixed on his face.

“What, ahhh, what brings you here?”

“I was — going to take a shower, actually.”

“In the middle of the night?”

This time she did look down at his towel. Rather pointedly.

“ — Right, see, I take showers in the middle of the night all the time, me, best time for it really, I think, only I didn’t know you ever take showers in the middle of the night, and isn’t it great we have common interests because it gives us so much to talk about? Do you do this often?”

“Not so often, no,” Amy said. “Don’t you — you have your own shower, don’t you? In your room?”

“Me? What, in my room, a shower? Oh! Yes, yes, yes. I do. Have a shower in my room, that is.”

“Why . . . are you not using that, then?”

“My shower? My shower is — ” Currently at maximum occupancy. “Broken,” he said brightly. “Yeah. Need to fix it. Probably going to have to . . . reverse the polarity of the . . . water . . . flow. Haven’t gotten around to it. You know how it is.”

“Yeah. Guess so.” She had gone back to fixedly not looking below the level of his eyes.

“Does Rory know you’re wandering around out here by yourself?” He tried to get a better grip on the towel, but ended up making things a bit worse.

“No, he passed right out, straight after — ”

“Ahh, yes, well, right. Well.” He shifted his weight uncomfortably from foot to foot. “I’m off to bed, then.”

“Do you — have someone in there?”

The Doctor laughed, a high-pitched sound he hoped sounded light-hearted and innocent and entirely wasn’t. “Sorry, what?”

“Your bedroom. I thought I heard voices when I walked past it.”

“No one’s been in my room all night except me,” he said, completely truthfully. “You must have imagined it,” he continued, less so.

“Guess so. Well — good night, then.”

“Good night.” He headed for the door, then stopped. “Sorry, only, I have to ask — if you’re wearing that, then Rory is — ?”

Her expression was tight-lipped and carefully neutral. “Policewoman’s outfit,” she said flatly.

“Right, well, yes, of course. Silly of me to ask, really.”

His eyes widened slightly at the sound of the shower room door opening behind him. Wider still at the sound of his own voice saying, “Are you coming back to bed? Oh, hello, Amy.”

Amy’s neutral expression failed spectacularly for a moment, and then made a complete recovery. “Doctor,” she said, nodding a greeting toward the door.

“Amy, it’s not what you think — ”

“Oooooh, I think it  _is_  what I think, actually.”

“She’s probably right, really,” said the cheerful voice from the doorway.

“You,” the Doctor said, turning to look at him, “are not helping.”

Right at that moment, the other other Doctor popped his head around the corner as well. Looked at the other Doctor and said, “Well, is he coming back to bed or not? Oh, hello, Amy.”

The Doctor slowly turned back toward Amy. She was looking at him, her mouth literally hanging open, a multitude of expressions warring for control of her face. Shock, horror, scandalized delight, maybe even a little awe.

“I can explain everything,” came a voice from the doorway.

“Shut up,” the Doctor explained, without turning around. “Amy. Amelia Pond. Listen to me carefully. Are you listening?”

“I,” Amy said, “am all ears.”

“I’m going to give you an extra present for your wedding. All right?”

Amy’s mind was clearly racing with possibilities. “ — Go on.”

He put a hand seriously on her shoulder. He would have put a hand on each shoulder, but that would have meant letting go of the towel. “That present is simply   
this — you and I are  _never going to talk about this night ever again._  Clear?”

“But — ”

“Policewoman’s outfit?”

Amy deflated. “Okay.”

“Good night, Amy.”

“Good night, Doctor. Umm — Doctors.”

He walked toward the door, shaking his head.

On a perverse impulse — not the first he’d had this evening — he turned back to her as he stepped out the door. “Oh, and Amy — ”

“Yes?” she said, almost hopefully.

“Sweet dreams.”

With an impish grin, he was gone. And the Doctor, the Doctor, and of course, the Doctor, went back to bed.

**Author's Note:**

> This was written more or less on a dare, as a thirty-third birthday present for my friend Ahna Blake. She is entirely to blame.


End file.
